Thinking, out loud.
Patrick's most-read ideas from LinkedIn, where 23,000+ followers join the conversation on business design, innovation tools and AI-powered ways of working.
How we redesigned the Value Proposition Canvas
Five updates that changed the way teams use it, starting with an uncomfortable admission: the canvas was the wrong way around. Western readers scan left to right, so every team began with the product and worked back toward the customer. A canvas designed to put the customer first, with a layout doing the opposite.
Cracking the code: from boxes to a chain of reasoning
The breakthrough wasn't more boxes, it was a cascade of logic. Eight boxes, seven verbs, one unbroken chain: persona defines the job, the job creates pains and gains, distilled into one sharp customer problem, answered by a value proposition customers experience as benefits. The verbs ARE the work.
Why the Value Proposition Canvas needs to evolve
It still works, but it was built for a different decade, a different way of working, and a different relationship between humans and AI. Three things are missing: the right starting point, a place for the customer problem, and a box for the value proposition itself.
Five people, five different customer problems
Ask the next five people on your innovation team to write down the customer problem they're working on, you'll probably get five different answers. That gap is where innovation projects quietly fail. Real innovation starts with defining the right problem, not generating ideas.
We need to break the silos
Most work in modern organizations doesn't get done, it gets shipped. Research ships a brief to strategy, strategy ships a deck to product, and by the time anything reaches a real customer, the original insight has been distorted at every handover. The fix: shared spaces, parallel work, one customer problem.
A canvas without a rhythm is just a poster on the wall
Beautiful workshops, energised teams, canvas on the wall, and three months later, nothing has changed. The canvas wasn't wrong; it was abandoned. The fix was never a better canvas. It was a rhythm: a cadence, an owner, a trigger, and one shared space.
AI as tool, copilot, or teammate?
Most teams still use AI the way a carpenter uses a power drill: faster output, same people, same work, same way. Augmented Collaboration is different, AI as a participant that understands the brief, works on the same customer problem, and contributes alongside humans. Not through handovers. Together.
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